The human capacity for language would not have given us any adaptive ecological advantage if it did not primarily serve the purpose of improving our ability to understand, trust, and rely on each other. A frame of collaborative niche construction allows us to contribute to rather than extract from the living planet. Healing starts with rediscovering our faith in humanity.
The NeurodiVerse Days of Solidarity offer a rich opportunity for omni-directional learning across cultures and geographies. The diversity in the way we collectively think about the future shapes the futures that are possible! There is an urgent need to catalyse intersectional ecologies of care all over the world, and to expose and oppose the internalised ableism that is holding our societies hostage.
Money and social power gradients are abstract cultural artefacts designed to defy compostability – social conventions that we can accept or reject, which are perpetuated by careless and learning disabled societies – creating conditions that are literally hostile to all life. “Build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ― Buckminster Fuller
The global mono-cult pretends that all aspects of life can be categorised and understood in terms of normality – by the hump of the bell curve. But the living planet does not conform to anthropocentric normality, it is chaotic, it is beautifully and awesomely diverse.
Life is a highly dynamic system. Reflecting deeply on the relational nature of life allows us to become reacquainted with human emotional limits. Powered-up relationships are inherently incompatible with healthy ways of being human. Along the way we also begin to re-appreciate the limits of human comprehensibility and sense making.
The cult of busyness undermines attempts at creating a shared understanding at a very basic level. In a hyper-competitive world the unexpected non-compliant Autistic behaviour is often misunderstood.
Ellie Rebarbar looks at the link between autism and addiction and how addiction resources fail autistic people.
I completely replaced who I was. My entire life was about drugs and alcohol. It was literally all I spoke about. All I thought about. All of my hopes and dreams washed away and were replaced by what I thought was a “lifestyle choice.”
Autistic people smoke at higher rates than the rest of the population, and the reasons may be more nuanced than what is expected.
David Gray-Hammond dispels the myth that autistic people are just adult children incapable of doing self-destructive, violent, or criminal behavior and asks society to consider their role in the circumstances that lead up to a vulnerable and traumatized adulthood.